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Born in Paarl, South Africa in 1961 and grew up in Cape Town region, Dave Vos holds engineering degrees Hons. B. Ing (Aero) from the University of Stellenbosch (1983), and S.M. (1989) and Ph.D. (1992) from MIT’s Aero/Astro Department, Boston, USA. His graduate work at MIT demonstrated the world’s first autonomous unicycle robot. Dave was CEO, CTO and Founder of Athena Technologies, incorporated in 1998. Athena developed and produced navigation, guidance, flight and engine control systems for the Unmanned Aircraft market.

Athena grew rapidly to become a market leader delivering autonomous navigation and control systems for a wide variety of unmanned aircraft programs worldwide and was acquired by Rockwell Collins in 2008. Vos was an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Winner in the Washington DC Region in 2007 and holds several patents in nonlinear control systems, failure detection systems, optimal power control systems and more. He recently served on the FAA UAS Aviation Rulemaking Committee for Integration of Unmanned Aircraft into the National Airspace System as well as on the NASA Unmanned Systems Advisory Committee. In August of 2014, Dave was named as Project Lead for Project Wing at Google X. Current areas of business and technology interest include Aerospace, Transportation and Renewable Energy.